Statistical Learning
Introduction to Core-sets: an Updated Survey
In optimization or machine learning problems we are given a set of items, usually points in some metric space, and the goal is to minimize or maximize an objective function over some space of candidate solutions. For example, in clustering problems, the input is a set of points in some metric space, and a common goal is to compute a set of centers in some other space (points, lines) that will minimize the sum of distances to these points. In database queries, we may need to compute such a some for a specific query set of k centers. However, traditional algorithms cannot handle modern systems that require parallel real-time computations of infinite distributed streams from sensors such as GPS, audio or video that arrive to a cloud, or networks of weaker devices such as smartphones or robots. Core-set is a "small data" summarization of the input "big data", where every possible query has approximately the same answer on both data sets. Generic techniques enable efficient coreset maintenance of streaming, distributed and dynamic data. Traditional algorithms can then be applied on these coresets to maintain the approximated optimal solutions. The challenge is to design coresets with provable tradeoff between their size and approximation error. This survey summarizes such constructions in a retrospective way, that aims to unified and simplify the state-of-the-art. Bringing big data to the enterprise, 2012) are generated by cheap and numerous information-sensing mobile devices, remote sensing, software logs, cameras, microphones, RFID readers and wireless sensor networks (Segaran & Hammerbacher, 2009; Hellerstein, 2008; Funke & Laue, 2007). These require clustering algorithms that, unlike traditional algorithms, (a) learn unbounded streaming data that cannot fit into main memory, (b) run in parallel on distributed data among thousands of machines, (c) use low communication between the machines (d) apply real-time computations on the device, (e) handle privacy and security issues. A common approach is to reinvent computer science for handling these new computational models, and develop new algorithms "from scratch" independently of existing solutions.
Game Plan: What AI can do for Football, and What Football can do for AI
Tuyls, Karl, Omidshafiei, Shayegan, Muller, Paul, Wang, Zhe, Connor, Jerome, Hennes, Daniel, Graham, Ian, Spearman, William, Waskett, Tim, Steele, Dafydd, Luc, Pauline, Recasens, Adria, Galashov, Alexandre, Thornton, Gregory, Elie, Romuald, Sprechmann, Pablo, Moreno, Pol, Cao, Kris, Garnelo, Marta, Dutta, Praneet, Valko, Michal, Heess, Nicolas, Bridgland, Alex, Perolat, Julien, De Vylder, Bart, Eslami, Ali, Rowland, Mark, Jaegle, Andrew, Munos, Remi, Back, Trevor, Ahamed, Razia, Bouton, Simon, Beauguerlange, Nathalie, Broshear, Jackson, Graepel, Thore, Hassabis, Demis
The rapid progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning has opened unprecedented analytics possibilities in various team and individual sports, including baseball, basketball, and tennis. More recently, AI techniques have been applied to football, due to a huge increase in data collection by professional teams, increased computational power, and advances in machine learning, with the goal of better addressing new scientific challenges involved in the analysis of both individual players' and coordinated teams' behaviors. The research challenges associated with predictive and prescriptive football analytics require new developments and progress at the intersection of statistical learning, game theory, and computer vision. In this paper, we provide an overarching perspective highlighting how the combination of these fields, in particular, forms a unique microcosm for AI research, while offering mutual benefits for professional teams, spectators, and broadcasters in the years to come. We illustrate that this duality makes football analytics a game changer of tremendous value, in terms of not only changing the game of football itself, but also in terms of what this domain can mean for the field of AI. We review the state-of-the-art and exemplify the types of analysis enabled by combining the aforementioned fields, including illustrative examples of counterfactual analysis using predictive models, and the combination of game-theoretic analysis of penalty kicks with statistical learning of player attributes. We conclude by highlighting envisioned downstream impacts, including possibilities for extensions to other sports (real and virtual).
Variational Bayes Neural Network: Posterior Consistency, Classification Accuracy and Computational Challenges
Bhattacharya, Shrijita, Liu, Zihuan, Maiti, Tapabrata
Bayesian neural network models (BNN) have re-surged in recent years due to the advancement of scalable computations and its utility in solving complex prediction problems in a wide variety of applications. Despite the popularity and usefulness of BNN, the conventional Markov Chain Monte Carlo based implementation suffers from high computational cost, limiting the use of this powerful technique in large scale studies. The variational Bayes inference has become a viable alternative to circumvent some of the computational issues. Although the approach is popular in machine learning, its application in statistics is somewhat limited. This paper develops a variational Bayesian neural network estimation methodology and related statistical theory. The numerical algorithms and their implementational are discussed in detail. The theory for posterior consistency, a desirable property in nonparametric Bayesian statistics, is also developed. This theory provides an assessment of prediction accuracy and guidelines for characterizing the prior distributions and variational family. The loss of using a variational posterior over the true posterior has also been quantified. The development is motivated by an important biomedical engineering application, namely building predictive tools for the transition from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease. The predictors are multi-modal and may involve complex interactive relations.
Understanding Variational Inference in Function-Space
Burt, David R., Ober, Sebastian W., Garriga-Alonso, Adrià, van der Wilk, Mark
Recent work has attempted to directly approximate the `function-space' or predictive posterior distribution of Bayesian models, without approximating the posterior distribution over the parameters. This is appealing in e.g. Bayesian neural networks, where we only need the former, and the latter is hard to represent. In this work, we highlight some advantages and limitations of employing the Kullback-Leibler divergence in this setting. For example, we show that minimizing the KL divergence between a wide class of parametric distributions and the posterior induced by a (non-degenerate) Gaussian process prior leads to an ill-defined objective function. Then, we propose (featurized) Bayesian linear regression as a benchmark for `function-space' inference methods that directly measures approximation quality. We apply this methodology to assess aspects of the objective function and inference scheme considered in Sun, Zhang, Shi, and Grosse (2018), emphasizing the quality of approximation to Bayesian inference as opposed to predictive performance.
Exact nuclear norm, completion and decomposition for random overcomplete tensors via degree-4 SOS
Kivva, Bohdan, Potechin, Aaron
In this paper we show that simple semidefinite programs inspired by degree $4$ SOS can exactly solve the tensor nuclear norm, tensor decomposition, and tensor completion problems on tensors with random asymmetric components. More precisely, for tensor nuclear norm and tensor decomposition, we show that w.h.p. these semidefinite programs can exactly find the nuclear norm and components of an $(n\times n\times n)$-tensor $\mathcal{T}$ with $m\leq n^{3/2}/polylog(n)$ random asymmetric components. For tensor completion, we show that w.h.p. the semidefinite program introduced by Potechin \& Steurer (2017) can exactly recover an $(n\times n\times n)$-tensor $\mathcal{T}$ with $m$ random asymmetric components from only $n^{3/2}m\, polylog(n)$ randomly observed entries. This gives the first theoretical guarantees for exact tensor completion in the overcomplete regime. This matches the best known results for approximate versions of these problems given by Barak \& Moitra (2015) for tensor completion, and Ma, Shi \& Steurer (2016) for tensor decomposition.
Benign Overfitting in Binary Classification of Gaussian Mixtures
Wang, Ke, Thrampoulidis, Christos
Deep neural networks generalize well despite being exceedingly overparametrized, but understanding the statistical principles behind this so called benign-overfitting phenomenon is not yet well understood. Recently there has been remarkable progress towards understanding benign-overfitting in simpler models, such as linear regression and, even more recently, linear classification. This paper studies benign-overfitting for data generated from a popular binary Gaussian mixtures model (GMM) and classifiers trained by support-vector machines (SVM). Our approach has two steps. First, we leverage an idea introduced in (Muthukumar et al. 2020) to relate the SVM solution to the least-squares (LS) solution. Second, we derive novel non-asymptotic bounds on the classification error of LS solution. Combining the two gives sufficient conditions on the overparameterization ratio and the signal-to-noise ratio that lead to benign overfitting. We corroborate our theoretical findings with numerical simulations.
Logistic Regression with PyTorch
We learned about linear regression in the last post, and now we move to logistic regression. As we cannot use linear regression for a classification task, we use logistic, which is an extension to linear regression for a classification task. Logistic regression is a good approach to problems that require probability as output. Suppose we create a model to predict a striker's probability when he is playing an away match. If a model predicts a p(score Away_Match) of 0.05, then overall away matches, the striker will score approximately 1 goal.
30 Machine Learning Interview Questions With Answers
Machine Learning interview questions is the essential part of Data Science interview and your path to becoming a Data Scientist. I've divided this guide to machine learning interview questions and answers into the categories so that you can more easily get to the information you need when it comes to machine learning questions. Supervised learning requires training using labelled data. For example, in order to do classification, which is a supervised learning task, you'll first need to label the data you'll use to train the model to classify data into your labelled groups. Unsupervised learning, in divergence, does not require labeling data explicitly.
How Goodhart's Law Can Save Machine Learning Research
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has been responsible for many of the most outstanding achievements in machine learning. The objective of SGD is to optimise a target in the form of a loss function. But SGD fails in finding'standard' loss functions in a few settings as it converges to the'easy' solutions. As we see above, when classifying sheep, the network learns to use the green background to identify the sheep present.
How do you know what independent variables to include in a regression model?
After a few biostatistics classes, I began fitting my first logistic regression model using my physician friend's data on tumors excised from skin cancer patients. I realized that although we were very clear about the dependent variable we were trying to predict – a certain feature of the tumor – I really did not know how to pick the independent variables that belonged in the model. We only had a few to choose from in our dataset, and I put them all into the model, but I wasn't really sure what to do next. Remove the ones that had a slope with a p 0.05? I asked one of my professors what to do, and in her own idiosyncratic way, she seemed to describe what I will call "stepwise selection".